One common practice of providing a company-wide collaboration environment requires the purchase of a tangible software product for local installation and deployment within a user or company network. For example, a company can deploy a company-wide network architecture to control file and resource access by users, relying in part on company firewall resources and a local directory application to maintain access permissions for the architecture. The directory can be used to contain a centralized list of users for the system. For example, a directory can be used to create a private workspace (My Site) for each user in the directory. As the number of users and network components increase, the task of maintaining security and access permissions can be time consuming and costly to the bottom line of a business that relies on the installed product.
As a natural evolution from the old paradigm, online application services are used more and more as businesses gravitate away from the often inefficient and tedious installation and management of applications and/or users within a defined network. Leaving the heavy lifting of maintenance, updates, and security to a separate entity is an attractive option. Ultimately, there has to be some mechanism in place to ensure that access to customer data is limited to authorized users. For example, hosted application services need to consider quality of service, site density, security, and/or other service issues. Complexities associated with controlling access to hosted application services by current and future customers compound with scale and become more difficult to maintain.